Vendor-Neutral Archives Aid Imaging Access, Migration

CARESTREAM Clinical Data Archive

March 5, 2010 - Vendor neutral archives virtualize enterprise storage and provide on-demand delivery of images and data to locations throughout the enterprise, regardless of where the information is physically stored or where it originated. These capabilities are engineered to streamline IT tasks and help healthcare providers reduce expenses.

At the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference held in Atlanta February 28 - March 4, 2010, featured the latest offerings in heathcare IT, including virtually archiving solutions.

One of the new vendor-neutral archives on view was CARESTREAM Clinical Data Archive. The data archive delivers a multi-tier repository for industry-standard data such as XDS, XDS-I and DICOM, as well as other non-DICOM data objects.

This enterprise-wide storage solution can be accessed through a Web client or integrated to existing EMR/HIS systems and provides a single point of access to the clinical patient portfolio. The data archive also delivers expanded layers of security to enhance the protection of patient data.

The vendor-neutral environment uses mechanisms such as dynamic tag morphing. Tag morphing facilitates interconnection of incompatible DICOM devices by allowing the archive to reference an internal library of PACS-specific tag addresses and attributes. With this capability, a DICOM header can be modified when transmitting DICOM image data acquired on one vendor’s PACS for widespread access by other users. This vendor-neutral archive is designed to allow healthcare facilities to maximize their investment in existing PACS, while enabling access to patient information across the enterprise. For facilities that need to replace their PACS, the CARESTREAM Clinical Data Archive aims to simplify data migration.

The archive allows IT administrators to choose from a series of new monitoring and management tools designed to address a range of facility sizes and needs. A user-configurable notification capability allows IT managers to identify specific errors and conditions that will trigger an alert.

The CARESTREAM Clinical Data Archive contains multiple layers of security to ensure that patient information can be viewed only by authorized individuals or groups. Rules have been further enhanced to allow location-specific and application-specific restrictions. Sensitive data can also be encrypted for specific modalities, archived sites, as well as for the entire archive.